Category: good to read

Matthew L. Pallamary
Introduction by Russell Brand, Preface by Sting
The author’s in-depth analysis of human perception, shamanism, visionary states, cognitive neuroscience, plant and animal consciousness, and sacred geometry, as well as the prehistoric roots of our deepest cultural myths not only lay bare the illusory roots of what we have built our failing society on, it provides a detailed map that points the way through the non-sense hall of mirrors that we currently find ourselves trapped in. Based on a lifetime of research, award-winning author, editor, and shamanic explorer Matthew J. Pallamary enlightens those with open minds courageous enough to question the illusions that most of us think of as real…
Mystic Ink, November 2017

Lexi Freiman
A search for belonging in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs turns into a riotous satire of identity politics in this wildly irreverent coming-of-age story. Starting at a prestigious private Australian girls’ school, fifteen-year-old Ziggy Klein is confronted with an alienating social hierarchy that hurls her into the arms of her grade’s most radical feminists. Plagued by fantasies of offensive sexual stereotypes and a psychotherapist mother who thinks bum-pinching is fine if it comes from the heart chakra, Ziggy sets off on a journey of self-discovery that moves from the Sydney drag scene to the extremist underbelly of the internet to the coastal Bohemia of a long-dissolved matriarchal cult.
Allan & Unwin, July 2018

Cixin Liu
A new science fiction adventure from the New York Times bestselling author of the Three-Body Trilogy: when Chen’s parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of this mysterious natural phenomenon. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. The more he learns, the more he comes to realise that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier. While Chen’s quest for answers gives purpose to his lonely life, it also pits him against a beautiful army major with an obsession with dangerous weaponry and a physicist who has no place for ethical considerations in his pursuit of knowledge.
Head of Zeus, August 2018

Thomas Hatsis
There is a long tradition of psychedelic magic and religion in Western civilization. As the author reveals, the discovery of the power of psychedelics and entheogens can be traced to the very first prehistoric expressions of human creativity. Describing how, when, and why different peoples in the Western world utilised sacred psychedelic plants, Hatsis examines the full range of magical and spiritual practices that include the ingestion of substances to achieve altered states. He discusses how psychedelics facilitated divinatory dream states for our ancient Neolithic ancestors and helped them find shamanic portals to the spirit world.
Park Street Press, September 2018

Paul Coelho
Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who wants to become a writer and sets off on a journey in search of a deeper meaning for his life: first on the famous ‘Death Train’ to Bolivia, then on to Peru, later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina. Paulo’s travels eventually take him to the famous Dam Square in Amsterdam where he meets Karla: love at first sight. They end up travelling to Kathmandu together with a small group of friends and their «Magic Bus».
Knopf-Doubleday, September 2018

Daniel Pinchbeck
Introduction by Russell Brand, Preface by Sting
«The actions we take over the next decade are critical. They will determine the destiny of our descendants and the fate of our world. How Soon is Now? presents a compelling manifesto for personal and planetary change. It proposes a new narrative for a unified social movement. Through global cooperation, we can face this collective threat – ecologically, socially, politically, and spiritually. We can launch a new operating system for human society based on regenerative principles. Accepting this crisis as our initiation, we can choose to evolve to the next level of consciousness as a species. We can do more than survive: we can thrive.»
PenguinRandomHouse, July 2018

Kate Davies
«We are living in an era of unprecedented crises, resulting in widespread feelings of fear, despair, and grief. Now, more than ever, maintaining hope for the future is a monumental task. Intrinsic Hope offers an antidote to these feelings. It shows how conventional ideas of hope are rooted in the belief that life will conform to our wishes and how this leads to disappointment and a dismal view of the future. As an alternative, the author offers «intrinsic hope,» a powerful, liberating, and positive approach to life based on having a deep trust in whatever happens. Davies shows how to cultivate intrinsic hope through practical tips and six mindful habits for living a positive, courageous life in these troubled times.»
New Society Publishers, Mai 2018

Nelson Mandala, Edited by Sahm Venter 
«Organised chronologically, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela begins in Pretoria Local Prison, where Mandela was held following his 1962 trial. In 1964, Mandela was taken to Robben Island Prison. After eighteen years, he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison, a large complex outside of Cape Town with beds and better food, but where he and four of his comrades were isolated and confined to a rooftop cell. Finally, Mandela was taken to Victor Verster Prison in 1988, where he was held until his release on February 11, 1990. During his 10,052 days of incarceration, the future leader of South Africa wrote a multitude of letters to unyielding prison authorities, fellow activists, government officials, and, most memorably, to his courageous wife, Winnie, and his five children.»
Norton, June 2018

Otessa Moshfegh
«A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?»
Penguin Books, July 2018

Ingrid Rojas Contreras
«Set in Colombia at the height of Pablo Escobar’s violent reign, this is the story of a sheltered girl and her teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both. Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in maid from the city’s guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona’s mysterious ways.»
PenguinRandomHouse, July 2018

Zora Neale Hurston 
A previously unpublished work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade – abducted from Africa on the last «Black Cargo» ship to arrive in the United States. Hurston twice interviewed eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis who spoke with her about his childhood in Africa, the voyage to America and his life as a slave thus providing the material for a unique document.
HarperCollins, June 2018

Cody Johnson
Did the CIA really use LSD as an enhanced military interrogation technique? Was Santa Claus really inspired by a hallucinogenic mushroom from Siberia? How can MDMA (Ecstasy) help people recover from trauma? Science is beginning to research what traditional cultures have told us for centuries: psychedelics have transformative healing properties. Many psychedelic plants and substances have a long history of being incorporated into various healing traditions. Magic Medicine explores the fascinating history of psychedelic substances and provides a contemporary update about their growing inclusion in modern medicine, science, and culture.
Fair Wind Press, June 2018 

Michiko Kakutani
Former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to the advent of the age of lies. In social media and literature, television, academia, and politics, she identifies the trends – originating on both the right and the left – that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science, and common values. And she returns to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly and eerily relevant.
Tim Duggan Books, July 2018 

Hugh Newman, Howard Crowhurst et al
How do you predict eclipses at Stonehenge? Why do the Carnac alignments follow geological fault lines? Was Avebury intentionally sited precisely one-seventh of a circle down from the North pole? Why are so many stone circles egg-shaped or flattened? What is the meaning of the designs in ancient rock art? Do you really have to wait nineteen years to visit the remote site of Callanish? What were the ancients up to? With eight authors, and packed with detailed information and exquisite rare illustrations, Megalith is a timeless and valuable sourcebook for anyone interested in prehistory.
Wooden Books, June 2018

Xaviant Haze
The author provides compelling evidence for a lost race of giants in Earth’s prehistory. He explores myths that go back thousands of years, including those found in the world’s holiest scriptures, as well as medieval and modern myths. He investigates historical reports of ancient giants found in Ireland and the British Isles—the remains of which mysteriously disappeared shortly after their discovery. He explores the legends of giants in Russia and goes deep into the Far East, revealing the multitude of fascinating giant legends in China. Were they the hybrid results from genetic experiments of ancient aliens or from the interbreeding of the fallen angels with the daughters of man?
Bear & Company, June 2018

Ayelet Waldman
When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from “Lewis Carroll,” Ayelet Waldman is at a low point. Her moods have become intolerably severe; she has tried nearly every medication possible; her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month–bursts of productivity, sleepless nights, a newfound sense of equanimity–she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it.
Penguin Random House, January 2018

Tao Lin
While reeling from one of the most creative — but at times self-destructive — outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin’s first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe?
Knopf Doubleday, May 2018 (eBook)

Chuck Palaniuk
The author’s first novel in four years is an ingeniously comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Smug, geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war in an effort to control the burgeoning population of young males; working-class men dream of burying the elites; and professors propound theories that offer students only the bleakest future. When Adjustment Day arrives, it fearlessly makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact, and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche: the author of Fight Club takes America beyond our darkest dreams in this timely satire.
W.W. Norton, May 2018

Clemantine Wamariya & Elizabeth Weil
Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbours began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognise the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks.
Doubleday, April 2018

Anadi Martel
Beginning with sun worship in prehistory and sunshine therapies in ancient  Egypt, Greece, and India, light has long been associated with the sublime, the divine, and healing. Yet only recently have we begun to understand how different parts of the light spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, can affect our physical and psychological wellbeing. Sharing his 30 years of research, Anadi Martel demonstrates light’s incredible effects on the physical, energetic, and cognitive dimensions of life. He examines several forms of light therapy and explains how to get optimal benefits from sunlight and avoid the health risks of new artificial lighting such as compact fluorescents.
Healing Art Press, May 2018

Jennifer Ulrich | Introduction by Zach Leary
The first collection of Timothy Leary’s (1920–1996) selected papers and  correspondence opens a window on the ideas that inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and the fascination with LSD that continues to the present. Leary cultivated interests that ranged across experimentation with hallucinogens, social change and legal reform, and mysticism and spirituality, with a passion to determine what lies beyond our consciousness. Through Leary’s papers, the reader meets such key figures as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Carl Sagan..
Abraham Press, April 2018

Michael Pollan
A brilliant and brave investigation by Michael Pollan, author of five New York Times best sellers, into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs – and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences. Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin are being used to provide relief to people suffering from depression, addiction and anxiety. Upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third.
Penguin/Random House, May 2015

Bruce Rimell 
The use of psychedelic drugs plants is becoming more and more wide-spread and with it the number of reports narrating encounters with otherworldly visionary beings. This wide-ranging book explores how our deepest mental processes predispose us as humans to believe in supernatural agents, and presents a new hypothesis of how these same cognitions facilitate the emergence of those agents to become present when psychedelic drugs and plants are ingested. Bruce concludes that visionary beings shimmer within as awe-inspiring products of the mind, an experience resting at the heart of what it is to be human.
Lulu.com, January 2018

Jessica Legon
Whether you are a seasoned psychonaut or just curious, this book is a great tool for introspection, integration and inspiration. Lose yourself in a huge, hand-drawn psychedelic inkscape overflowing with lavish detail: 23 immersive, full-page, lavishly detailed illustrations inspired by consciousness-altering substances for adults to colour, information on ten of the most common psychedelic substances and a little bit of advice on appropriate, responsible use and safe practice. Jessica Legon has created a lovely tool as well as a blueprint for many reflective hours spent colouring. Jessica Legon has created a lovely tool as well as a blueprint for many reflective hours. Full of useful information and smart advice.
www.ety.com/uk/shop/PsychedelicColouring, April 2018

Jason Louv
Dr. John Dee (1527-1608), court advisor and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, was the foremost scientific genius of the 16th century. Laying the foundation for modern science, he promoted mathematics and astronomy as well as advancing navigation and optics thus helping to elevate England to the foremost imperial power in the world. Presenting a comprehensive look at his life and continuing influence, Jason Louv examines Dee’s scientific achievements, intelligence and spy work, imperial strategising, and his methods of communicating with angels. He also explores Enochian in precise detail and reconstructs Dee’s Spirit Diaries.
Inner Traditions, April 2018

Galen Strawson
The author might be described as the Montaigne of modern philosophers, endlessly curious, enormously erudite, unafraid of strange, difficult, and provocative propositions, and able to describe them clearly – in other words, he is a true essayist. This book gathers three of them: “A Fallacy of Our Age”, “The Sense of Self” and “Real Naturalism.” “Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me is, despite its title, no collection of complaints. Rather, Strawson invokes the notion of being bothered in the largest sense, engaging with the ideas, or conditions of living, that will not leave him alone…” (Ian McEwan) Drawing on literature and life as much as on philosophy, this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder.
Series: New York Review of Books, March 2018

Dean Radin
The chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) turns a critical eye toward such practices as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. Are such powers really possible? Science says yes.
According to the bestselling author of The Conscious Universe magic is a natural aspect of reality, and each of us can tap into this power with diligent practice. The author, who worked on the US government’s top secret psychic espionage program known as Stargate, has spent the last forty years conducting controlled experiments that demonstrate that thoughts are things, that we can sense others’ emotions and intentions from a distance, that intuition is more powerful than we thought, and that we can tap into the power of intention. These dormant powers can help us to lead more interesting and fulfilling lives.
Harmony, April 2018

Aida Edemariam
In this fascinating memoir that recalls the life of her ninety-five-year old grandmother, Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam tells the story of modern Ethiopia—a nation that would undergo a tumultuous transformation from feudalism to monarchy to Marxist revolution to democracy over the course of one century. Born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar in about 1916, Yetemegnu was married and had given birth before she turned fifteen. Over the next decades Yetemegnu endured extraordinary trials: the death of some of her children; her husband’s imprisonment; and the detention of one of her sons. She witnessed the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia and the subsequent resistance, suffered Allied bombardment and exile from her city; lived through a bloody revolution and the nationalization of her land, and much more.
Harper/Collins, March 2018

Stephen Ball
This book shares instructions and rituals for using the oracle with dice or other divinatory tools. You will also find a list of meanings for every possible elemental combination, and explanations of how Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Sun, and Moon manifest in this divination system. When you explore the oracle’s patterns and correspondences, you gain insight into the challenges and concerns that we all face. With just three dice, you can receive answers to basic questions or initiate a deeper interpretive journey. Based on elemental forces that have been consulted by healers and sages for thousands of years, this dice oracle will inspire you to see yourself and the world with a whole new perspective.
Llewellyn, March 2018

Ian Buruma
A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him. With his signature acuity, Ian Buruma brilliantly captures the historical tensions between east and west, the clash of conflicting cultures, and the dilemma of the gaijin in Japanese society, constantly free, yet always on the outside. The result is a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic, and sexual. And so a child of European privilege wound up vamping in a red jockstrap, doing a whiskey ad with Akira Kurosawa, and having affairs with women and men. Most astonishingly, he left six years later with the same girlfriend, his future wife.
Penguin/Random House, March 2018

Paul Saltzmann
This new edition of The Beatles in India brings intimate images of the group, taken at an ashram in Rishikesh, India, to a wider audience than ever before. No photographers or press were allowed at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas, but the Beatles had no objection to fellow visitor Paul Saltzman freely snapping pictures during their time there. Containing a wide-ranging narrative by Saltzman – about everything from the story of how “Dear Prudence” came to be to George Harrison’s description of the first time he picked up a sitar – this unique and exclusive exploration of one of the Beatles’ most tender and bittersweet periods is a must-have for all fans of the legendary rock group.
Simon & Schuster, February 2018 

Karl Ove Knausgaard
The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to the author’s unborn daughter. In preparation for her arrival, Karl Ove Knausgaard takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays – to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze.
Penguin Random House, January 2018

Deepak Chopra / Rudolph E. Tanzi
After collaborating on two major books featured as PBS specials, Super Brain and Super Genes, Chopra and Tanzi now tackle the issue of lifelong health and heightened immunity. They want to help readers make the best decisions possible when it comes to creating a holistic and transformative health plan for life. In The Healing Self they not only push the boundaries of the intellect to put forward the newest research and insights on the mind-body, mind-gene, and mind-immunity connections, but they offer a cutting-edge, seven-day action plan, which outlines the key tools everyone needs to develop their own effective and personalised path to self-healing.
Rider, February 2018

Ian Marchant
This is the story of how an old man called Bob Rowberry ended up in a broken-down bus, in a forgotten part of the world. It tells of how, along the way, Procol Harum were named after his cat, how he sold Owsley acid to R.D. Laing, of how he annoyed Saddam Hussein and the IRA, and how he was freed from jail in Mexico by a popular uprising of the peasantry who had come to know him as ‘El Maestro’. It’s also the story of his times, and the ideas that shaped him, of why you know your birth sign, why you have friends called Willow, why Yoko Ono affected how we eat much more than Linda McCartney ever did, why sex and drugs and rock’n’roll once mattered more than money, why dance music stopped the New Age Travellers from travelling, and why you need to think twice before taking the brown acid.
Jonathan Cape, March 2018

Zadie Smith
Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, “Joy,” and, “Find Your Beach,” Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith’s own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive – and never any less than perfect company. Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel, White Teeth, almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. This is literary journalism at its best.
Penguin Random House, February 2018

Bill Minutaglio & Steven L. Davis
The adventures of Timothy Leary’s odyssee from Harvard to hell and back make for a racy read. Spanning twenty-eight months, President Nixon’s careening, global manhunt for Dr. Leary winds its way among homegrown radicals, European aristocrats, a Black Panther outpost in Algeria, an international arms dealer, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and secret agents on four continents. The “LSD Apostle’s” escape from jail took him to Switzerland, Algeria and Afghanistan and back to jail in California, where Charles Manson was his neighbor. Based on freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews.

Eileen Day McKusick
When Eileen McKusick began offering sound therapy in her massage practice she soon discovered she could use tuning forks to locate and hear disturbances in the energy field, or biofield, that surrounds each of us. She found these energetic disturbances correlated with the emotional and physical traumas her clients had experienced throughout their lives, the biofield acting as a record of pain, stress and trauma from gestation onward.
Healing Arts Press, January 2018

Wallace Stegner 
Stegner retells the story of the bard who became the stuff of fiction for the alleged murder of a Salt Lake City businessman. Organiser, rebel, singer of Labor Songs who fought relentllessly for Trade Unions, Joel Hill was a peerless fighter in frequently violent battles between organised labour and industry. This is a full-bodied portrait of both the man & the myth: from his entrance into the short-lived Industrial Workers of the World union to his trial, imprisonment & final martyrdom.
Penguin Random House, January 2018

Mark Russell & Steve Pugh (illustrations) 
In Russell and Feehan’s hands, Hanna-Barbera’s audacious pink mountain lion is given a new, Flintstonian shading: this Snagglepuss is more stylish, more fuchsia, more unapologetic than his original cartoon iteration. He’s a successful, adored playwright, smooth and confident even if the world around him is on fire. He’s also gay, and living as a closeted homosexual mountain lion in 1953 is awful – all the more since success has made him a target.
DC Comics, January 2018

James Oroc 
Entheogens are powerful tools of self-discovery; Oroc studies the works and lives of Albert Hofmann, Terence McKenna and Alexander Shulgin in order to gain deeper insight into the history and future of psychedelics and how to cultivate a positive attitude towards the dreamtime that could transform our culture. The author is an active part of the psychedelic renaissance, a revival that has been a long time coming though it never was a long time gone.
Park Street Press, January 201

Bobby Campbell
Come take a quick trip through the lives & ideas of Robert Anton Wilson in this illustrated elucidation of some but not all his most illuminating memes and profundities. Visionary cartoonist Bobby Campbell gleefully adapts Wilson’s neurosemantic brilliance into the visual language of the comic book medium in an explosion of non-linear, cosmic psychedelia. Whether you are a fully initiated Discordian Pope, or a starry eyed seeker of the 23 enigma, this RAW funny book will bring the synchronistic magick of Illuminatus! right where you are sitting now.
Hilaritas Press, December 2017

Torsten E. Klimmer (Omananda)
Transcendental Journeys is a world traveler’s testimony of three decades. A mystical near death experience in Sumatra starts the spiritual journeys of the author who describes the process of conscious awakening in the collective evolution of man through his visionary writings. This artful multimedia book with photography and embedded video links urges people to free themselves. It inspires direct action towards the profound shift in perspective that is required today. Discoveries in exotic places and shamanic dimensions are slowly revealed during this nonfictional cosmic adventure that offers an exciting view into the visual, spiritual, and practical possibilities available to anyone with an open mind.
© Omananda, December 2017

Peter Carey 
This thrilling, high-speed story starts in one way and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, the more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner, even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves. Set in the 1950s amid the consequences of the age of empires, this brilliantly vivid and lively novel reminds us how Europeans took possession of a timeless culture – the high purpose they invented and the crimes they committed along the way. Peter Carey has twice won the Booker Prize for his explorations of Australian history. A Long Way from Home is his late-style masterpiece.
Kindle, February 2018

Jin Yong
The world imagined by Chinese writer Jin Yong is one which celebrates loyalty, courage and the triumph of the individual over a corrupt and authoritarian state. The world’s biggest kung fu fantasy writer, Jin Yong, the “Lord of the Rings of Chinese literature” enjoys huge popularity in the Chinese-speaking world. In the west, however, his name is barely known, largely due to the complexity of the world he has created and the puzzle that has posed for translators. Set in China in 1200 and written in the wuxia or fighting hero tradition, A Hero Born tells of an empire close to collapse. Under attack from the Jurchen Jin dynasty, the future of the entire Chinese population rests in the hands of a few lone martial arts exponents.
Kindle, February 2018

Peter Frankopan
Far more than a history of the Silk Roads, this book is truly a revelatory new history of the world, promising to destabilize notions of where we come from and where we are headed next. From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts.
Penguin, March 2017

Toni Morrison
America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.
© Toni Morrison, September 2017

Peter Wohlleben
Through vivid stories of devoted pigs, two-timing magpies, and scheming roosters, The Inner Life of Animals weaves the latest scientific research into how animals interact with the world with Peter Wohlleben’s personal experiences in forests and fields. Horses feel shame, deer grieve, and goats discipline their kids. Ravens call their friends by name, rats regret bad choices, and butterflies choose the very best places for their children to grow up.
Greystone books, November 2017

Rupert Sheldrake
In this pioneering book Rupert Sheldrake shows how science helps validate seven practices on which all religions are built, and which are part of our common human heritage: Meditation, Gratitude, Connecting with nature, Relating to plants, Rituals, Singing and chanting, Pilgrimage and holy places. The effects of spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically, and many studies have shown that religious and spiritual practices generally make people happier and healthier. Rupert Sheldrake summarizes the latest scientific research in these fields.
Hodder & Stoughton, November 2017

Dr. Richard Louis Miller
This book explores the tumultuous history of psychedelic research, the efforts to restore psychedelic therapies, and the links between psychiatric drugs and mental illness. It includes the work of Rick Doblin, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Julie Holland, Dennis McKenna, David Nichols, Charles Grob, Phil Wolfson, Michael and Annie Mithoefer, Roland Griffiths, Katherine MacLean, and Robert Whitaker.
Park Street Press, November 2017

Nelson Mandela & Mandla Langa
The long-awaited second volume of Nelson Mandela’s memoirs, left unfinished at his death and never before available, is here completed and expanded with notes and speeches written by Mandela during his historic presidency, making for a moving sequel to his worldwide bestseller Long Walk to Freedom.
Park Street Press, November 2017